Is Mars habitable? Could ancient life once have existed on the Red Planet? Is there potential for life today deep beneath the Martian crust? Ell Bogat from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is here to dig into some of the details.
Is Mars habitable? Well, maybe.
The question is, “Is it habitable and for whom?”
Mars is hundreds of degrees colder than Earth; it has a hundred times less atmosphere and that atmosphere has hardly any oxygen. But there may be other forms of life that could have evolved that aren’t very much like us but are very much like the early forms of life that evolved on Earth.
Mars has evidence of being warmer in the past and of having stable liquid surface water for potentially hundreds of thousands of years. So, it’s possible that in Mars’ past there was a time where life could have evolved in that particular environment.
We have been trying to definitively answer whether or not Mars is habitable, and as of yet, the answer is still definitely maybe.
Learn more about the NASA’s search for life beyond Earth: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobiology
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